Quiet weekend

We had a lovely, quiet weekend. Lots of cooking, which was a nice change of pace from our usual weekends, which are spent inside one restaurant after another. I even made a delicious chocolate layer cake, and if I had it to do over again, I would put more chocolate between the layers, but other than that-- delicious. I even topped it with chocolate shavings from Hershey bars from the boys' long forgotten Halloween stash.

Harry loved it

(Jack did too, but he ate his before I could take a picture.)

Ben surprised Harry with a trip to the Badger game on Saturday, and when Harry found out where they were going, he jumped up and down and clapped his fat little hands. "Just me and you Dada?" he asked. He looked at his shirt. "Mama!" he said. "You put me in a Wisconsin shirt this morning! Dd you know I would be going to see Bucky?"

He had a great time despite the freezing rain and a long walk to the stadium

Scholastic book orders sure have changed

Harry and Jack's are totally online now, although their teachers still hand out the good old flyer (you know the one-- it hasn't changed since you were in school). We perused the flyer at the coffee shop after school the other day, and in the morning before Jack woke up, Harry and I placed our online order.

I was such an old lady about the whole thng-- found the website really hard to navigate and had to call customer service twice- once because I couldn't find my ten-digit customer number and once because I pushed "send" too many times and ordered 5 of my shopping cart. D'oh.

When we selected our books-- chapter books for Harry, a bunch of interminable Dora books for Jack, some blended holiday books, and a few funny stories from my childhood that I'm excited to read-- I thought about all the quiet bedtimes these books will bring with them, fat little fingers that point to the pages and lisping, lilting voices that will ask plot questions, soft, damp heads that smell like lavender, and smooth, shiny cheeks pressed against mine, sweet dreams surely to come.

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So, technically, this is a NaBloPoMo FAIL, but you guys. The other day, we had a hard day that I absolutely cannot blog about. I needed a couple of days to get my shit back together. Reading over the past 11 posts helped me realize how much I have to be thankful for. I hope someday I can tell you all the story, but for now, know that we are well and so, so happy.

Coatless

Thank god or global warming
for sun-soaked seventies on Wisconsin's
November afternoon.

After school playground run
surprises all three of us with breezy kisses
we swear belong to Spring.

Shadows fall long across slides,
last beams slanting gold through fence links, chill
creeping, sending us home to warm

Morning meditation

The beauty of a blank slate

No matter how smart my phone, I love nothing more than grabbing a Sharpie pen and a clean page in my Moleskine, spreading out my bright pink leather bound daybook, and creating my list for the day.

I usually have a hot latte beside me on my desk and Facebook open on the screen in front of me. This early in the morning, I am just checking in, not wasting time.

And the opposite of a blank slate-- my face that's filling in with this extraordinarily ordinary life I'm loving living.

Here I am at my desk on Monday, the promise of a new week before me, my eyes crinkled from gaining a sleepless hour before dawn Sunday.


I am starting to dig the lines on my forehead, deepening creases on either side of my mouth, crepe paper under my eyes. I like the way my face is rearranging itself to accommodate age, the worry of children, deadlines, and degrees. It's a lived-in face, one that used to get too tan and knows how to smile. Even the roughening, reddening by my nose, the broken capillaries on my left cheek are old friends in the mirror.

I only wish I had known at an insecure, hungry 16 how more than half-full I'd be at 32.

Sick Day

Last week, Jack and I were both home sick on the same day. While it was a bit of a challenge to be sick while taking care of a sick kid, I don't think I have ever just hung out with Jack all day. It was lovely. He's hilarious, newly a senence-speaker, and has the best syntax ever. We watched The Princess and the Frog and lots of Dora.

I asked him a few questions and thought I'd share:

NaNoWriMo update

Like you care.

But seriously, I am having so much fun with this project. It is important to note that I haveno delusions of literary grandeur. I went into this project expecting to write crap, and I am not disappointed. I think I have had moments where things are really good-- sometimes I get into the zone and it's just good, you know? I can feel that it's working. Other times, though, writing is work, and I have forgotten how much work it is.

My plan was to remember how to write everyday, to fall back in love with writing everyday, to remember that writing is a discipline, to reacquaint myself with my process, and in that regard, it's going really well. I am not sure how much of my particular NaNoWriMo process will translate into my scholarly work (because I need to turn my book-length dissertation into an actual book already), but I am gaining some insights about exactly how much I can do with the kids around.

I wrote a novel when I was in high school called The Skandalous Khronicles of Kiki's Kancer Kastle. It was about a housewife who went batshit and threw a stone bench through the window of a tanning salon, killing a tanning salon attendant and a couple of clients. My awesome friend Lara was going to illustrate it for me, but I lost enthusiasm for the project soon after its completion. TSKKKK was short on plot and long on characters. It told the story of 25 tanners in booths, 2 ladies in waiting (room), a couple of salon employees, and two literal flies on the wall, changing perspectives with each chapter. I am really good at describing small moments and at sketching characters, but larger plot points have never been my strong suit. All of the action in TSKKKK happened in a span of 20 minutes. I am a little at a loss here as I try to develop a more realistic storyline.

Lest you think I am a total idiot for bringing up a high school novel I printed on my Dot Matrix and put in a purple binder, writing the title in a black magic marker and dotting the i's with tiny flower stickers, I found it the other month at my parents' house, and I read parts of it, and you guys, it was good. And really, really funny in places (the flies on the wall had a love story going on that cracked me up). I mean, I was a high school kid, so it was rough, but I was a high school kid and everybody told me what a good writer I was, and I had so much confidence. That's what I need to find again.

So, I am working on it. And to facilitate that work, I am bribing my kids with things like TOY STORY 3!!! MOTY for sure.